With Windows 8 struggling to win fans and Windows Phone failing to set the world alight, Microsoft takes its wins where it can these days.
Little wonder then that Redmond is keen to point out that it has become the number one hypervisor vendor on x86 … in Latin American during the third quarter of 2013.
Redmond's source for …

Numbers can lie.....

I would be very surprised if this was accurate given the data coming from Gartner and just about every other analysts showing VMware with the lion's share of the market.

The problem with this analysis from IDC is that they don't really know how many Hyper-V deployments there actually are. Without hard data they assume that a certain number of Windows licenses will end up running Hyper-V. (but don't tell you what percentage they assume)

Compare that to VMware where you know that every deployment will result in a hypervisor depoyment.

This doesn't surprise me, I work for a "large backup software manufacturer" we're seeing huge demand for hyper-v agents, one of our veeps described it as "coming through like a freight train."

On a personal note, I have two micro servers in my hone lab. One runs VMware, the other hyper-v. They're both pretty much on a par these days, the only thing that hyper-v is obviously missing is USB passthrough and live disk expansion.

I have to say that I'm happier putting my trust in VMWare. VMWare has one, clearly defined, purpose. Hyper-V is, from what I've seen of it, an MS bolt-on to the OS to try to catch up (and then farmed out as a separate product by trying to remove the rest of the visible parts of the Windows system from the hypervisor).

I've seen several corrupt Hyper-V configs. They seem to be quite easy to make happen, completely by accident, where you can get hypervisors with supposed VM-failover to other hypervisors which never actually happens. And you get things like multiple instances of a particular VM running on multiple (or even the same!) hypervisor quite easily when they shouldn't be, which jams things up. The fixes for the problems I saw were basically to go into an XML file on the hypervisors and wipe things out manually and then re-run the VM's, which isn't confidence-inspiring.

Not to mention that some requirements basically mean that the version of hypervisor you use is determining of - and a determinate of - what you intend to run inside it. Simple things like expanding a VM disk stored on your SAN can get quite complicated quite quickly. And simple things like being able to share drives between VM's didn't come along until much later (Server 2012-only, I believe).

I can't say I'm that impressed by what I've seen of Hyper-V. It seems to be a little bit flaky and a bodge and I wouldn't trust it not to fallover. And that's not what you want in something designed to provide higher-availability (wouldn't go so far as to claim HA with Hyper-V) through the use of VM's.

Then, from what I've read, simple things like USB passthrough, audio, disc burning, etc. either aren't present or just don't work as they should. Yeah, sure, they are more desktop-oriented features but it's still a bit of a killer when other competitors have supported such things for a while.

I'm sure it's handy because it's built-in to Windows Server. I'm sure it's good enough for a lot of purposes. But it makes me worry enough that I'd just find other software - software designed to do nothing BUT this kind of thing - if I had a pressing need to do it.

"Hyper-V is, from what I've seen of it, an MS bolt-on to the OS to try to catch up (and then farmed out as a separate product by trying to remove the rest of the visible parts of the Windows system from the hypervisor)."

No, that's more like the Linux Hypervisor model where you have to run a bolt on to the full kernel. Hyper-V Server is like VMWare ESXi - a dedicated Hypervisor layer. You can optionally run it under Windows Server, but its a completely seperate product also.

"simple things like being able to share drives between VM's"

Sharing disks is actually incredibly complex under the hood. Your comments suggest that you are a button pusher with very little understanding of the actual technology.

"I've seen several corrupt Hyper-V configs. They seem to be quite easy to make happen, completely by accident,"

I have seen dozens on VMware in similar circumstances - a disk fills up or a vmotion fails for instance...

"The fixes for the problems I saw were basically to go into an XML file on the hypervisors and wipe things out manually and then re-run the VM's, which isn't confidence-inspiring."

So just like VMWare then.

"And simple things like being able to share drives between VM's didn't come along until much later "

Sharing write access to disks is actually incredibly complex. Your comments suggest that you are a button pusher with little understanding of the underlying technology.

"It seems to be a little bit flaky and a bodge and I wouldn't trust it not to fallover."

Unqualified FUD now - Windows clustering technology is far more widespread than VMWare's!

"simple things like USB passthrough, audio, disc burning, etc. either aren't present or just don't work as they should"

Wrong.

"I'm sure it's handy because it's built-in to Windows Server"

No - it CAN run under Windows Server, but it is a seprate product entirely. Completely free as fully featured version: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/evalcenter/dn205299.aspx

"But it makes me worry enough that I'd just find other software - software designed to do nothing BUT this kind of thing"

After VMWare and Hyper-V the next competing product has about a 1% market share...

Re: Best Hyper-V feature

"I will not recommend anybody doing anything serious (large scale) with Hyper-V, it does way too many odd things when the clusters get large, and becomes flaky very quickly."

Utter rubbish. It scales to double the number of nodes VMWare does, and Windows clustering technology is far more widespread and proven. Also VMWare still only supports up to 2TB disk images - whereas Hyper-V supports up to 64TB.

"Hyper-V is just good for running a few windows VMs on a server to try to isolate stuff and minimize server count."

Re: Best Hyper-V feature

Re: Best Hyper-V feature

"Where?"

The vast majority of FT 500 companies have SQL Server clustering deployed for instance (amongst many other commonly Microsoft clustering options / applications). The technology was included from NT 4.0 onwards...

Solid as a rock...

I particularly liked the scenario we had, all the nodes alerted they could neither manage nor access the cluster shared volumes even though vms were running on all hosts on the very same CSVs! We had to remote in to every vm, shut each down and reboot the whole cluster that came back up without error or indication of what had happened. There were no errors on the FC SAN or switching.

Re: Explanation, anyone?

Could be that the answer is disingenuous. For example, I took USB passthrough as meaning that I can add a USB dongle to the server and pass this through to a particular VM to allow the application that needs the dongle to work virtualised. From looking at the link, it appears that the USB passthrough that Hyper-V supports is simply that I can passthough a USB pen drive from my laptop to the virtual machine console which only admins are ever going to use. Not sure about the disk expansion bit but I have lost faith in the poster by now and so am skeptical about his/her further claims from a technology perspective.

Re: Explanation, anyone?

Useless

This is another one of those graphs showing licenses sold and the price of said licenses... That declining "others" could well be used twice as often as Hyper-V but costs far less for all the graph tells us.

Re: Useless

"As the Hyper-V Server version is totally free with all features enabled, if anything this graph likely under represents Hyper-V market share"

Indeed - at the SME end of the scale, nobody's going to record sales of a 'Hyper-V' solution. It'll simply started getting used. Lies damn lies and statistics are the order of the day for all the players.

Lucky MS

IMO the only reason that MS is where it is today in the hypervisor space is that its had the good fortune of chasing the market leader, MS doesn't need a vision it can just stand at the back and when vmware says something they cry "we agree!" They don't need a vision or to understand their customer they just need to chase feature parity with vmware. Hyper-V and cluster based resource pooling..... makes hyper-v just another silo.

Lets put MS in the market leader position with windows 8, the touch screen OS for the enterprise :(